Mental Landscapes: Owen Rival | Feature Gallery Exhibition

Join us for the opening with Owen Rival on Friday, June 13th, from 5 - 8:00 PM

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Abbozzo Gallery is proud to present Mental Landscapes, the first Canadian solo exhibition of Toronto-born, Texas-based painter Owen Rival. In this new body of work, Rival charts the shifting terrain between memory and emotion, offering not literal depictions of place, but internalized impressions shaped by feeling. In this series, the artist constructs not a topographical map, but a psychic one—where form bends to feeling, and places exist not as they are, but as they are remembered. The result is a suite of moody, atmospheric compositions that read less as documentation and more as reverie.

Comprising paintings that hover between the representational and the abstract, Mental Landscapes offers a meditation on the invisible architecture of routine. These are not direct depictions of physical spaces so much as psychic impressions, rendered in cool hues and softened lines that evoke the fog of recollection. The works gesture toward the emotional residue of daily life—repetition, isolation, inertia—and ask how the mind makes sense of the ordinary over time.

In Purgatory, the artist stages the commute as an existential loop: neither here nor there, just endlessly in between. Rendered with blurred edges and a tonal monotony, it evokes the weight of unchanging ritual—a liminal space where meaning erodes under repetition. In Lost, we drift further into abstraction. The city of Toronto sags and warps, stripped of context, as if seen through the veil of fatigue or detachment. The mood is quiet, even clinical, suggesting a world that is both familiar and estranged.

Throughout the exhibition, space is not fixed or factual, but emotional—elastic, unstable, and deeply internal. The haze that clings to these scenes is not a weather condition, but a psychological one. Memory behaves like mist: it obscures, distorts, and beautifies in equal measure. The artist leans into this instability, allowing their own subjectivity to reshape the world’s contours.

If these works have a protagonist, it is not a figure but a feeling. The paintings operate as emotional weather reports, forecasting states of disconnection, longing, and quiet observation. Mental Landscapes is not concerned with charting terrain, but with rendering atmosphere—inviting us to inhabit the soft, unsteady spaces between where we’ve been and how we felt when we were there.